This collection of essays aims to trace the exchanges, responses, affinities and fissures between the worlds of Sanskrit and Tamil literary cultures in the medieval period. The literati who produced the works in these languages moved freely between domains that earlier Indological scholarship has tended to compartmentalise. The eleven studies presented in this volume strive to move beyond this narrow perspective and thus do justice to the richness and complexity of the cultural synthesis that took shape in South India in this period. By looking at the articulation of identities, practices, and discourses in texts of a range of genres composed in Tamil and Sanskrit (as well as Prakrit and Malayalam), these essays supply a picture of South India in the medieval period that is unique in its historical depth and conceptual complexity and demonstrate innovative ways to investigate and problematise cross-cultural phenomena, while suggesting how much work yet remains to be done.

1) Whitney Cox is Senior Lecturer in Sanskrit at SOAS, University of London. His primary research interests are in the fields of literary, cul¬tural, and intellectual history of the medieval Indian subcontinent, with a special concentration on the Tamil country. Proficient in both Sanskrit and Tamil, his work charts the multiple transformations of society, pol¬ity, and textual culture during the course of the twelfth to the fourteenth centuries. The author of numerous articles, he co-edited the volume South Asian Texts in History: Critical Engagements with Sheldon Pollock, and his forthcoming work includes a study of philological scholarship in late-medieval times and a reinterpretation of the accession of the Cōḻa emperor Kulottuṅga I. 2) Vincenzo Vergiani is lecturer in Sanskrit at the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, University of Cambridge. His main areas of research are the Sanskrit grammatical tradition and the history of linguistic ideas in pre-modern South Asia. He is the director of the project “The intellectual and religious traditions of South Asia as seen through the Sanskrit manuscript collections of the University Library, Cambridge” (http://sanskrit.lib.cam.ac.uk/), funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council. He has co-edited Studies in the Kāśikāvṛtti. The section on pratyāhāras. Critical edition, translation and other contributions (2009).